SEED - Speed Planning

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PRODUCTS & SERVICES: Speed Planning

Journey Mapping Intention Tracking The Diagnostic Seeding the Vision

WHAT IT DOES: This 3-hour, iterative planning workshop distills the essence of strategic planning within a fast-paced, consensus-building process. Activities guide leadership teams to create dynamic blueprints for advancing what is most essential, where quick wins are feasible, and where values underlying the work can find best expression. Specific, time-linked benchmarks are defined, against which monthly progress will be assessed. Using Speed Planning as an annual team practice:

Short-term intentions are continuously re-aligned with longer-term vision and values
Leaders become more intentional and accountable as a team
Leadership teams regularize practices for tracking monthly progress against measurable, attainable success markers
Participants experience shifts in perspective sparked by imaginative team thinking
Promising new options for action become apparent and able to be integrated within continuous planning cycles.

HOW IT WORKS: Planning exercises lead to discovery of generative ideas that leaders can plant in many aspects of their work with real promise. These high-leverage, strategic growth opportunities are made the focus for planning. As a result, resource allocation, message development, program delivery and data collection become streamlined and more sharpely focused to significantly advance the agency towards realizing its vision.

UNIQUE FEATURES:: Triggers discovery of strategies that will shift program focus in subtle ways and yield profound and exciting results. Participants are guided to infuse planning with deeply held core values, to build on their strengths, and consider how to more fully activate the wisdom, wealth and work of staff, board members, volunteers, clients, community members and friends. Once the plan is clarified, SEED next offers monthly 90-minute coaching sessions, called "stretch" meetings. Each leadership team selects one or two members to train with a SEED coach. The individuals designated should be strong at group facilitation and/or want to excel in this role. The full team, in turn, is then guided by these leaders to make creative thinking and innovation central features of monthly plan updates and longer-range strategizing.

SAMPLE OF USERS: 9 Illinois youth development programs; Americorps Leaders in Training Program of LEAP (New Haven), Artists Striving to End Poverty (New York); Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (NY), Georgia Parent Information Research Center; Summer Search (7 Cities); Partnership for Health Education in Africa (New York), Trinity Boston Foundation.

Read how a national leadership program made use of the Speed Planning.

Return to SEED Building Blocks

"Thanks for an extraordinary experience. You have the amazing ability to simultaneously create.a sense that things are wide open and yet also provide structure and a.sense of momentum. it is quite a gift."

Jay Jacobs,
CEO Summer Search

"We now have a clearer understanding of where our skills and abilities meet the unmet need in the community. The strategic plan is so clear, actionable, and relevant… and the fact that our volunteer committee drove the entire process feels like the system was working the way it is supposed to work!"

Louise Packard, ED,
Trinity Boston Foundation

"I’ve learned that my inkling that our organization has a lot of untapped potential is in fact the reality. I want to keep remembering that in the future. This type of process helps to keep open the idea of potential."

Bich Ha Pham, PAR
Director, Federation of
Protestant Welfare
Agencies